blueberry lemon cake Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

In the pan – Photo: L. Weikel

Lemon Blueberry Poke Cake

Oh, the Lemon Blueberry Poke Cake I baked the other day is certifiably evil. You’ve all seen the photos from the night I baked it. And I’ve definitely received some requests for the recipe.

What I need to tell you is this: it’s even better after sitting in the refrigerator overnight!

Unexpected Source

Before I give you the links to the variety of recipes I used to create this masterpiece of mouthwatering summer goodness, you’ll never guess where this all got started.

Last Sunday (Karl’s birthday), we had no hot water. We’ve been having a weird issue with our furnace over the past several weeks. It just mysteriously shuts off and doesn’t come back on when it should to heat our water. Luckily for us, when we hit the emergency re-set button, it’s been firing back up.

Monday morning it happened again. Even though I was confident it would re-ignite if we hit the re-set again, let’s face it: this is an untenable situation. It’s all fine now, but not when it goes off in the middle of the night during the winter. So I called the company, Haly Oil, that maintains and provides service to our furnace.

I’ve become friendly with Renee, who basically seems to run the whole show in our local office, since March or April, when the pandemic first started gearing up and our furnace started acting up. As you might imagine, she was appalled that we’re still having trouble. But one thing led to another and the next thing I knew, I was telling her about the double icing chocolate cake I’d baked for Karl the day before.

That’s when she told me that her father’s birthday was this week as well (pretty sure it was the 12^th), and she described for me the yummy cake she’d baked for him over the weekend too. When she described it, I asked her for the recipe, thinking I would do what I did and make it to commemorate Karl Daniel’s day.

Some Tweaks

The original recipe that Renee sent me is here.

Because I wanted to bake a vanilla cake from scratch (hey, I’m home; I might as well try), I looked up some recipes on the internet and found two from the same source. One is called “The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had” and the other is called Favorite White Cake.

Both, as can be seen from the link address, are concoctions from the website Sally’s Baking Addiction.

For this first attempt, and to create what you see depicted in these photographs, I followed the “The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had” recipe.

It. Is. Yummy.

In following the Lemon Blueberry Poke Cake recipe (by Lauren Miyashiro at delish.com), but shared by Renee, I tweaked it using organic whipped cream instead of ‘whipped topping.’ But pretty much everything else (except, of course baking the actual cake from scratch) I followed to a ‘t.’

Making Friends

All of this just goes to show the benefit of making friends wherever you find yourself. If it hadn’t been for Renee’s friendly attitude and willingness to share a most delicious recipe, I wouldn’t have been able to share this with you (and pig out over several very satisfying nights of decadent dessert-eating*).

See what you think! Next time I might give the “white cake” recipe a try. As you can see, the vanilla cake became quite dense after being refrigerated. Poor us. Ha!

*Karl approves and endorses this message.

Not a lot left – Photo: L. Weikel

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Blueberry-lemon birthday cake – Photo: L. Weikel

Birthday

Some of you may have caught on to the deeper meaning when I wished you a “Happy 13^th of August” last night. In spite of the foundation upon which all of my posts are founded (my 1111 Devotion), I try not to be too maudlin about the life (and death) of my eldest son, Karl Daniel. But whether I mention it or not, August 13^th will always be the anniversary of his birthday.

Every year is a little bit different. And it doesn’t progress in a linear fashion, believe me. If it did, I’d be breathing a sigh of relief, knowing that every single year would bring me just that little bit less sadness, just a slightly diminished tendency to wonder what his life would be like now, who he’d be, what he’d be doing in the world right now.

But life isn’t like that. Death isn’t like that. When it first hits you, especially as a parent enduring that freaking nightmare of losing a child (regardless of whether they’re 3 months, 3 years, or 30 years when they die) most of us feel we might very well lose our minds before ever coming to terms with the reality of losing our baby forever.

For most of us, though, the searing pain at first loss that we feel will never ease, never diminish (indeed, that we vow we’ll never let go of – for to lose that edge will somehow, we feel, lessen the importance of their life to both us and to the world) inexplicably does. And honestly, at least for me, it was involuntary. I did not want to lose that edge.

Life Goes On

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I wanted to wear that loss on my vest and claim it as a defining, debilitating, characteristic of my life. The exact opposite, as a matter of fact. I wanted the gaping hole in my heart that belongs to my eldest son to spur me on to helping others cope with their grief when faced with similar loss.

So as we’re told in lyrics and poems, life goes on. We rail against it, when the loss is fresh. We secretly damn the people who tell us ‘time heals all wounds’ – most of the ones who say that have never felt the sense of having a phantom limb haunting us that losing one of our children creates. They think losing a parent is the same thing.

It’s not.

They think losing a sibling is the same thing.

It’s not.

Forgiveness

But ultimately, we have to extend to the people around us the most exquisite (and sometimes hardest to come by) gift: forgiveness. Most are doing the best they can to comfort us at a time when we’re experiencing something that simply blows their minds. And at the same time, it’s incumbent upon us to extend that same olive branch of forgiveness to our very own selves.

Yes, eventually – even if we try really hard to keep it at the forefront and make our lives center around it – the nearly unbearable pain of losing our child will eventually withdraw into the background of our lives. It’s at once surprising, unsettling, sad, and a relief. And a little guilt-inducing as well.

If we really loved them, would we ever allow ourselves to lose that edge? It’s a question that has a hollow and unsatisfactory answer.

My Point

The point I started to make when I began this post was that you just never know when the grief is going to sneak up behind you and clobber you over the head.

Upon waking this morning I felt a genuine heaviness around my heart. I’d sensed Karl ‘around’ a couple days earlier, but didn’t particularly feel him today. When I did notice him a few days ago, it made me realize that his ‘visits,’ if you can even call them that, are much more infrequent nowadays. And while I can appreciate that this happens, and why, it nevertheless makes me sad.

So I decided to bake a cake. What the heck. For 30 years I’d made a point of baking (or procuring) two cakes within the span of one week, since his father’s birthday is only four days before my son’s.

Only this time I decided to make something totally different. A vanilla cake. (I’ve never made one of those before. Not even once!) And it would have blueberries and lemon going on to make it special and festive. I rationalized that this would be the type of cake I’d buy at my favorite bakery, Crossroads, and almost certainly did for not a few birthdays over the years.

So here it is. The fruit of my reminiscing about my son and celebrating what should have been his 39th birthday today.

Never assume that just because it’s been a bunch of years since the loss of a child that their memory and how much they are missed has diminished.